Title: “Cool Me Down”
Category: Single
Runtime: 2 min 52s
Genre: Afrobeats
Release Date: 14/04/2023
Rating: ★ ★★★★★★☆☆☆ – 7/10
Checks out; sounds just about as 2023 as any hit of that variety last year. It eases in with subdued beats, as many a song lately in that subgenre. So, it’s up to the intricate opening harmonies to grab immediate attention at the intro. And grab it by the melody, they do! It’s some delightfully intricate vocal work right there. For a complement, there’s some kind of organ simulation underneath it all, effective enough to be noticed, but too faint to stand out.
Cxnrvd bites in with a comfortably generic voice, soon launching into some time-frozen references like “play that piano”, against buoyantly imposing beats. After that phase, the tune adds a slightly earthy dimension to ifs flow; shakers, call & response and all. True to its dynamic feel to this point, it bounces back to a fuller sound.
Throughout its close-to-3 minutes, the track is free-flowing, even to a fault. It’s more a thing of the sum, rather than the parts. There’s all these phases, one after the other, that are individually brilliant but make for a somewhat patchy whole. To the singer’s credit, the piece is uniformly non-uniform. In other words, he doesn’t wander off once to return, but spreads the freeflow throughout, which signals an intentionality to it. Not a save, but confidence makes everything better, even flaws.
Could this tune be made right now in 2024 and not give off a dated feel? 100%. Artistically speaking, there’s not a lot that existed on the Afrobeats musical spectrum last year that’s been lost to time. Lyrically too, the same themes have abounded in the subgenre up to now. “Cool Me Down”, for its part, goes the “let’s love & vibe” route. To be fair, that’s a rather common theme, not bound to any period. But the basicness with which it’s delivered here is, for the lack of a better way to put it, a feature of this kind of music. And that’s not a criticism. In fact, it’s best-suited that way. An attempt at abstractly exploring such a theme within the straightforward confines of Afrobeats is likely to be conceptually jarring. All in all, it’s interesting to think about what the 2025 version of us would think of this same track. But the present is all we have, and from where we are now, the tune was a decent bop!
